Sid’s Blog

Mythbuntu

My DVD player, which is a Sony and only about 5 years old, is on the fritz.  My Tivo, likewise 5 years old, is showing heavy pixilation which I’m going to assume is related to it’s hard drive being 5 years old and having run 24×365 and starting to go (over 43,000 hours).  My (current) TV is standard definition, but I plan on upgrading to HDTV this Christmas (or sooner if my plans pan out). I wasn’t looking forward to the price of a set-top Blu-Ray player nor an HD Tivo, both of which would be limited to playing content only on the TV they were attached to, so I decided to go it alone and build a media center computer.

I poked around a lot and have setteled on an Ubuntu implmentation of MythTV called Mythbuntu. I seriously considered adding some stuff (a video capture card, larger hard drive, HDMI output, etc) to an older PC which I had just decomissioned and was planning on donating (wiped the hard drive and installed Ubuntu Hardy). However, after doing some research I decided to build a decently powered frontend/backend combination which will later be the hub of my content.  I’m going to be assembling the system this weekend and plan on tinkering a few days with it before moving it into the living room. I did my research and setteled on the following hardware:

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Sid Boswell Blog, Life, Linux Hardware, Linux, Mythbuntu, MythTV, Ubuntu

Comcast

I’m not sure when this started happening, but I can’t seem to isolate the problem and I’m assuming that Comcast is to blame. I’m running this blog on a PC in my house connected to the interWeb via Comcast residential high speed Internet. I’m keeping DNS humming along using DynDNS even though my “dynamic” IP address (via DHCP) has not changed since the Adelphia to Comcast migration (and hadn’t changed on Adelphia prior to that migration). Even before I was running this blog, I had a wiki using MediaWiki running (it still is).

Here’s what’s happening….I can add a comment or a new wiki page (which is an HTTP POST transaction) from home or remotely (outside of my LAN). However, I’m limited to the size of my comments (or wiki pages) when I’m remote (outside of my LAN).  Once I get more than a paragraph or so in a comment (or a wiki page) and hit “send” my browser just hangs.  Incidentally, this also happens when creating a blog post while logged in to WordPress.

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Sid Boswell Blog, Life, Linux BoswellWiki, Comcast, Internet, Linux, Ubuntu, Wordpress

It seems that Apple’s cloud computing push teknology for some reason decided that only Mac OS X and Windoze would be able to use their nifty cloud computing push iPhone teknology.  In other words, they have either left the open source community hanging or they intentionally pulled the plug on compatibility across platforms.  Try to browse to the www.me.com from any Linux PC (unless you are running something under WINE) and you’ll get a big fat, “it ain’t like that.”  This includes eeePCs, the $199 gOS netbooks sold at GoodEmployeeBenefitsmart and anybody who decides not to back down to the evil empire or use an iPhone.  For all their embracing of open source, Apple seems to have left the open source community hanging.

What I’m getting at is that MobileMe does not support Linux.  I’m pretty sure it isn’t a compatibility or a features issue as if you spoof your browser using a well known FireFox extension (user agent switcher) you can get it to work, but why bother?  What is Apple saying to the non-Apple Hardware, non-Microsoft crowd out there?

I have an iPhone and a MacBookPro for work, but I’m pissed that I can’t have access to my address book from my eeePC or from any of my other Linux boxes.

Sid Boswell Blog, Life, Linux Apple, Linux, Ubuntu, Vista, Windoze

Powered by ...

In an effort to clean up my URLs for my personal Web site as well as the wiki I have been running, I decided to add virtual hosting to my Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) box. The most difficult and time consuming part of it was keeping what I was doing straight.  I was frustrated as hell with it until I realized that I had to continualy clear my cache of my Firefox broswer when I wanted to test a new setting in the /etc/apache2/sites-available directory.

The process included:

1. enabling the virtual hosting module (a2enmod vhost_alias)
2. creating virtual host config files in /etc/apache2/sites-available
3. enabling the new virtual sites (a2ensite sitename)
4. restarting apache (apache2ctl restart)

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Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Linux, Ubuntu

Wordpress

So, I decided that I would move my blog from iWeb to WordPress.  One of the reasons I decided to do this is it will give me the capability of hosting more blogs and even doing content based blogging.  I also was dumping my iWeb folder onto my Ubuntu box and therefore didn’t have the ability to allow comments on my blog.  I will still keep my personal Web site based on iWeb (at least for now), and will work on integrating them together if at all possible.

I installed WordPress on my Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS) installation.  I initially used the package from the ubuntu repositories (apt-get) but after my initial spin, I decided to go with the most recent tarball from WordPress itself.  Installation was a breeze and consisted of:

1. unpacking the tarball (tar -xvf filename)
2. changing the ownership of the wordpress directory to allow the Apache user write privileges (chown -R user:group wordpress)
3. creating a wordpress user and database in phpMyAdmin
4. browsing to the wordpress directory

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Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Apple, Linux, Ubuntu, Wordpress

Parent's pond in Brunswick

So, I haven’t blogged in a long time. Since the family vacation in Maine I got a job, but that’s probably not the only or even the main reason. I just haven’t thought about it much and never made the time. I’m doing it now as I’m setting up a new server to replace my old Pentium HT that I bought in 2001.

Elvis has been up and running for almost a year and a half and I started thinking about all the energy it has been burning just sitting there responding to the occasional HTTP request. I also happened to have the need for a laptop on a temporary basis so I figured the two would dovetail nicely.

The laptop is a Dell Inspiron D410 subnotebook (Blackcow) that I bought used for a few hundred duckets. It’s more than capable of hosting this site as well as about a half dozen other sites that Elvis has been hosting. Some do get quite a few visits, but not enough to tax the Apache2 webserver nor the MySQL database on which most of the sites (this one not included as it’s an output of Mac OS X iWeb) use.

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Sid Boswell Blog, Life, Linux BoswellWiki, Linux, Ubuntu

Ubuntu Screenshot

I have to admit that the upgrade procedure in Ubuntu is yet another tick in the positive column in regards to the distribution. My install isn’t even a standard install and using the upgrade tool to upgrade from 6.10 (Edgy Eft) to 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) was a breeze.

I’m not sure why Ubuntu chooses to use these strange monikers to refer to releases, as most other linux distributions still use release version numbers. Even Apple still uses (mostly) version numbers (10.4.9) with the exception to the huge releases which are usually major version number changes (i.e. Panther, Tiger (10.4), Leopard (10.5?) (now delayed until June or August due to developers being pulled from OS X and put on iPhone)). I think back to the changes of naming of major releases and I can’t help starting to think about Microsoft and their changes from Windoze 3.1 and 3.11 to using years (95, 98) to using names (me, XP, and of course Vista (and all it’s various flavors). Likewise, we somewhere seem to have lost the use of version numbers in most Microsoft products (Office used to have version numbers, then years (2003), then names (XP (can’t remember which one came first … the banana or the egg)), and I now they are just moving to marketing terms (to try to keep Google and other “software as a service” models from gaining (more) market share) like Office Live (ROFLMAO) and yet they are back to (or continuing to) use years (Office 2007).

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Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Linux, Ubuntu, Vista, Windoze

Ubuntu Logo

I’ve migrated just about everything from my iMac to Elvis (my Ubuntu Linux server running on my old Pentium desktop). If there are any gaping holes in any of my information please let me know (i.e. if there is anything that did not get migrated).

Now that I am (mostly) migrated, I’ll start to play around with some other LAMP based services for fun (forums, blogs, etc.).

I’ll usually post my updates to this blog or the news page on the wiki.

Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Apple, Linux

Ubuntu

Now that I’m just about fully converted off of my old PC, I’ve decided to have some fun with it. Some folks wonder how I can consider this fun, but to each his own.

I’ve decided to try to live without Windoze. I’m sure that I”ll have to run it for some things (Stacie really likes the buttons on the front of the scanner that make “copies”), but most of those things can be done in a virtual machine. I won’t delete my XP partitions just yet, but will attempt to use native XP (as opposed to XP in a VM) as little as possible.

I started with downloading some of the live CDs/DVDs for some Linux distributions to figure out which ones I like. I tried Mandriva, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, CentOS, and openSUSE. I really liked KDE in Kubuntu, but am more comfortable with GNOME and it seems more stable and a bit faster. I narrowed my search down to CentOS, SUSE, and Ubuntu.

Next, I decided to actually install the distributions that I liked and take a whorl at configuring them and getting things set up like I like them (LAMP + Parallels + a few other odds and ends). Here is what I discovered…. Read more…

Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Apple, Linux, Ubuntu, Windoze